Spiritual TV role resonates with Ohio native

Wednesday

May 29, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 29, 2013 at 10:11 AM

FRESNO, Calif. - Anne Heche believes firmly in second chances.Which explains why the actress connects so well with her role in the new NBC series Save Me. Heche plays Beth Harper, a woman who wouldn't make the top-1,000 list for wife or mother of the year.

FRESNO, Calif. — Anne Heche believes firmly in second chances.Which explains why the actress connects so well with her role in the new NBC series Save Me.

Heche plays Beth Harper, a woman who wouldn’t make the top-1,000 list for wife or mother of the year. Her world changes, though, when she sees the light — literally — after a near-death experience. Beth returns to the land of the living with an open line to God. Her husband (Michael Landes) is skeptical; her teenage daughter (Madison Davenport) is horrified.

“By the time we come in to meet her and she’s choking on a hoagie, her life isn’t great,” Heche said. “She gets a second chance to do it again. And I love that because I’ve been so blessed with many chances in my life that I get really excited by being able to play women who get to do it all again.”Humans, Heche said, inevitably reach a point in life when they need something to believe in.“ Wherever we get our strength from — I think we have so much courage, everybody, to walk through this life and try to make it right.”

The actress has appeared on several television series, such as Ally McBeal, Everwood and Men in Trees. She has also appeared in films and on Broadway — additional examples of the second chances that she has been given in her life.

The 43-year-old native of Aurora, Ohio, said she shares the same determination to make people happy that Beth has after the character’s close encounter with death.

“She’s a really positive person,” Heche said. “This connection that she has with God has filled her with the joy of life. And she wants to give it to everybody like a gift. “When you have that big of a gift, sometimes people don’t want it. It doesn’t always work out perfectly for her, but she is really trying to figure it out in a positive way. And I love all that about her. She’s a total goofball, and so am I.”

Heche hopes that the show will make viewers feel good.“God is something that I have confronted, questioned, dealt with, looked at, experienced, rejected, embraced my whole life,” she said. “I’ve had a give-and-take with this God identity. .?.?. I think everybody talks to God sometimes. I think everybody tries to figure God out.” Save Me, she said, is a story about a woman who deals with that every moment of her life and wants to use the experience of God to help people.

“So I hope that people feel like God’s out there helping them out,” Heche said. “If you can find God in a friend, if you can find God in a smile of a stranger, it’s here, you know? It’s here. “We’r e here to help each other out. And I hope people feel that from the show, even if it’s to make people laugh. Who’s to say that laughter isn’t God?”

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